My invention relates to baking devices such as bread pans, pizza stones, and cookie sheets.
My invention converts the common kitchen stove and/or range into an "old world" commercial type bakers' oven (made of sand, firebricks and stone) with the capability of making hearth baked breads, pizza, rolls, and cookies without the need for modifications or adjustments or acts of judgement by the user, and/or spending a large sum of money for a new appliance.
The principle or quality behind hearth-baked bread (i.e., baking bread directly on heated unglazed bricks or stones) can be traced to antiquity. The idea of baking breads and related products directly on the brick hearth of an oven has been around for centuries. Attempts have been made in the past to build special stoves and baking pans to simulate the hearth baked products of antiquity, but these suffered from the expense of installation and purchase of large appliances and disappointing results.
Instead of constructing a cooking stove made entirely of bricks, sand, and stone, others have designed a stove with special features of lowering and raising hearth bricks for temperature control and a means of emitting steam into the oven. Such a stove would be impractical to install in the common kitchen and would prove too costly just to produce hearth-baked bread.
It would be highly desirable to provide an accessory to a conventional common wall oven or stove which allowed one to bake free-form bread, pizzas, rolls and the like with a quality comparable to that achievable with a commercial brick oven.